


Ages

by Satan (CherryBones)



Series: Immortals [1]
Category: Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - GTA, Completely unedited from the half-awake and aggravated original writing, Gen, Immortal Fake AH Crew, This is pretty much just a character study of Ryan as an immortal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-04
Updated: 2015-08-04
Packaged: 2018-04-13 00:32:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,269
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4500912
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CherryBones/pseuds/Satan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The inner workings of a man born before the age of time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ages

Is it wrong to not know one's own age? To not know exactly how old one is? To shrug when someone asks on what day you were born, in what year?

He figures it stops mattering when you were born before a time of calendars, when the only way to tell time was the moving of the sky above and the veracity of the green beneath your feet. And he might have even existed before a time like that, as far as he knows he may have existed when the first breath was taken. He might have taken that first breath for all he can remember. All he knows is that he is old, old beyond the years of any history book. All he knows is that he has remained the same for millennia, unchanged by the world as it shaped around him. All he knows is that everything that would normally kill a being that exists in the mold of average humanity he can brush off like a pesky fly.

Past a certain point, the mind must just give up on trying to keep hold of everything and just lets go of what it considers unimportant. But he wants to remember, he wants to hold on to everything, and so there are the journals. Endless books spanning innumerable languages, remembered and forgotten by the sprawl of humanity. Some days he wonders if maybe he created some of the languages inscribed within the ancient pages, if maybe he was the first to ever attempt to write down things with symbols and not pictures and words. As always, he doesn't remember. Everything slips into a haze as time slips by.

He doesn't know another that is his age. Perhaps they simply don't exist, perhaps he is some genome or magic that existed just for him and then lay dormant for thousands of years. Maybe there was an entity up in the stars and it thought it was funny to watch him exist alone for so very long. He's fairly sure there were centuries where he was insane, where he broke apart and slowly pieced himself together again. Then again, perhaps there was once, perhaps they found a way to make the cold dark of death permanent. Perhaps they grew bored with the world. Perhaps that was the key.

He doesn't think he could ever get bored with it all. There's always something new, something fascinating and wonderful to be explored or discovered. He remembers the most recent, the last few millennia, he remembers the rise and fall of empires, he remembers kingship, he remembers poorness. He remembers walking from one end of the world to another with nothing but what he could carry on his back. He remembers.

He remembers the feel of polished steel sliding through flesh for the first time, leaving blunt weapons behind. He remembers the first kick of gunpowder and fire within his hands. He remembers screams and death and the cold black over and over again. He remembers reveling in it and screaming out in anger at it. He remembers, he remembers so many things.

Another turn of the century, a new world to be discovered in the shape of a continent never seen before. The earth was endlessly fascinating. It was the first time in three centuries that he had fought in a war, protecting the country he called his new home. He traveled, met even more wonderful people, watched them wither and die and, not for the first time, felt sad. He cried for them, then moved on. He knows, as he has known for so very long, that there is no use mourning over death. Some things are meant to be let be.

A new millennia, he travels back and forth across the country a few times, musing to himself about the old little towns that now stretch high into the sky.

Perhaps, he thinks, it's time to chose a name, to become someone for a while.

He decides he likes the name Haywood while he sits in a sprawling tree he remembers from when he first dropped the apple that would become it in the dirt, swinging his legs absently. Ryan, he decides. Ryan Haywood.

It's in a tiny little diner with a photo of him sixty years previous behind the counter that he decides Ryan will be chaos and violence and death. He hasn't done something like that in a while. He pays for his pie and waves goodbye, deciding he'll visit again in another few decades.

The jacket he's already had for a few years, worn and loved and found abandoned in a quiet highway bar. The mask he finds during a random jaunt through a costume store. The twenty-first century is very meticulous about its surveillance, a mask is better than being recognized from thirty year old footage. The facepaint brings back vague memories of war paint and screams and violence and he buys it with a warm grin on his face.

Ryan Haywood should have a criminal name, that decision comes while walking down the side of an old dirt road towards the coast, the effort required to get a car deemed too much when he has all the time in the world.

He glances down at the road and laughs, the perfect name springing to mind, and so Ryan Haywood becomes the Vagabond.

The man, now Ryan, doesn't expect for the Vagabond to get so big, to become something whispered about in dark alley streets. He muses at the personality people build around the mask, the character the rumors give him that he falls into gratefully. Quiet and dangerous and mad, terse and sharp in interaction, wild and laughing with an explosion to his back. No one would ever suspect the awkward and fumbling Ryan Haywood to be the same person, what with his comfortable clothing and too-small glasses that he's never bothered to get changed.

How he winds up in Los Santos, how he winds up _living_ there, he doesn't remember. Another memory lost to the fog. But here he is with a quiet little apartment, all his trinkets and journals stacked carefully in boxes in the spare bedroom. He enjoys it though, and so he stays.

And then Geoff Ramsey finds him.

He doesn't expect much at first, another group of children too young in a mind as old as his, trying to play grown up with just a bit more violence and death.

This changes when he watches Ramsey put a bullet through his second-in-command, just to cut in line. When he watches Pattillo stand up with a grumble about yet another ruined shirt.

They're like him, he realizes, and something jolts within him. He hasn't met another like himself in nearly five hundred years, and here are a handful of them, proud and headstrong and young, still oh so young. Even their eldest has nothing on his years.

They worm into his heart, into his sore old heart that hasn't allowed another past its walls of apathy in generations. He finds himself sharing his journals, explaining his trinkets, letting them become a part of his life until he can't imagine a time without them ever again.

He stands and watches them sprawled across the cushions, laughing and innocent and with so many years ahead of them. Fear shivers through him for the first time in memory, a sharp surge of protectiveness just on its heels. He'll protect them, he decides. He won't let them be alone like he has been.

By the stars, he'll protect them until the day he finally dies.

**Author's Note:**

> It was late and I got angry at Thief and somehow this happened. Based on an ask I sent [ryanthepowerbottomguy](ryanthepowerbottomguy.tumblr.com) on Tumblr right [here](http://ryanthepowerbottomguy.tumblr.com/post/125767588768/i-really-like-the-idea-of-immortal-fahc-ryan-being).


End file.
